Close Read: What Did Seymour Hersh Say About Assassinations?

A couple of weeks ago, some members of Congress let it be known that Leon Panetta, the director of the C.I.A., had confessed something to them. Panetta said that there had been a program that the C.I.A. should have told Congress about almost eight years earlier but hadn’t. He had just learned about it, and had ordered the program ended.

Naturally, people wanted to know what the big secret was. The C.I.A. and members of Congress said that they couldn’t tell, but soon enough there were reports that, as the Times put it last week,

Since 2001, the Central Intelligence Agency has developed plans to dispatch small teams overseas to kill senior Qaeda terrorists.

The officials who confirmed this for the Times also told reporters that “the plans remained vague and were never carried out….Yet year after year, according to officials briefed on the program, the plans were never completely shelved.”

People also remembered that Seymour M. Hersh had said or written something about this. His reference to an “executive assassination ring,” which he made at an event in Minnesota with Walter Mondale, of all people, was picked up widely. Hersh urged anyone who asked to look at what he’d actually written about the Bush Administration and assassination. That sounded useful, so I went back and read his stories again.

HUNTER-KILLER TEAMS

Let’s start with motive. In “What Went Wrong,” in the October 8, 2001, issue—on newsstands October 1, 2001, and reported as the dust was still settling at Ground Zero—a “C.I.A. man” spoke to Hersh about the need to consider tactics that “defy the American rule of law”:

“We need to do this—knock them down one by one,” he said. “Are we serious about getting rid of the problem—instead of sitting around making diversity quilts?”

Hersh picked up the story in “Manhunt,” in the December 23 & 30, 2002, issue. The piece began with the killing, by Hellfire missile, of an Al Qaeda leader named Qaed Salim Sinan al-Harethi. At the time, Bush Administration officials told reporters that Harethi was on a list of “ ‘high-value’ targets whose elimination, by capture or death, had been called for by President Bush.” A Yemeni official told Hersh that in the course of the operation

there had been two intelligence “mistakes” that almost resulted in targeting innocent Bedouins.

Hersh went on,

The al-Harethi operation also marked a dramatic escalation of the American war on terrorism. For more than a generation, state-endorsed assassination has been anathema in the United States. In 1975, after revelations of C.I.A. efforts in the nineteen-sixties to kill Fidel Castro and other hostile foreign leaders, a Senate committee led by Frank Church concluded that such plotting “violates moral precepts fundamental to our way of life.”… In 1976, President Gerald Ford signed an executive order banning political assassination, and that order remains in force.

In the aftermath of September 11th, however, the targeting and killing of individual Al Qaeda members without juridical process has come to be seen within the Bush Administration as justifiable military action in a new kind of war, involving international terrorist organizations and unstable states.

On July 22nd, [2002,] Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld issued a secret directive ordering Air Force General Charles Holland, the four-star commander of Special Operations, “to develop a plan to find and deal with members of terrorist organizations.” He added, “The objective is to capture terrorists for interrogation or, if necessary, to kill them, not simply to arrest them in a law-enforcement exercise.” The manhunt would be global in its reach, Rumsfeld wrote, and Holland was to cut through the Pentagon bureaucracy and process deployment orders “in minutes and hours, not days and weeks.”

Hersh wrote that many of those he spoke to in the military and the intelligence communities

have expressed alarm at the Pentagon policy about targeting Al Qaeda members. Their concerns have less to do with the legality of the program than with its wisdom, its ethics, and, ultimately, its efficacy.

“They want to turn these guys into assassins,” a former high-level intelligence officer told me. “They want to go on rumors—not facts—and go for political effect, and that’s what the Special Forces Command is really afraid of. Rummy is saying that politics is bigger than war, and we need to take guys out for political effect: ‘You have to kill Goebbels to get to Hitler.’ ”

Later in the piece, Hersh writes:

In internal Defense Department memos, Rumsfeld and the civilian officials close to him laid out the case for a new approach to the war on terrorism, one that would rely, in part, on the killing of selected individuals.

In one such memo,

Rumsfeld was told, “We ‘over-plan’ for every contingency…. This denies us the agility and tactical surprise so necessary for manhunts, snatches, and retribution raids. We must be willing to accept the risks associated with a smaller footprint.” The paper urged the Secretary to “ensure that the military leadership understands fully the cultural change you seek.” The manhunting teams must be kept “small and agile,” the paper noted, and “must be able to operate clandestinely, using a full range of official and non-official cover arrangements to travel and to enter countries surreptitiously.”

What did this mean? A Pentagon consultant told Hersh:

“We’ve created a culture in the Special Forces—twenty- and twenty-one-year-olds who need adult leadership. They’re assuming you’ve got legal authority, and they’ll do it”—eagerly eliminate any target assigned to them. Eventually, the intelligence will be bad, he said, and innocent people will be killed. “And then they’ll get hung.”

“PREËMPTIVE MANHUNTING”

A year later, in “Moving Targets” (December 15, 2003), Hersh wrote about assassination as a tactic in Iraq, where what had looked like a quick victory by American forces was beginning to look much murkier:

A new Special Forces group, designated Task Force 121, has been assembled from Army Delta Force members, Navy SEALs, and C.I.A. paramilitary operatives, with many additional personnel ordered to report by January. Its highest priority is the neutralization of the Baathist insurgents, by capture or assassination. The revitalized Special Forces mission is a policy victory for Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, who has struggled for two years to get the military leadership to accept the strategy of what he calls “Manhunts”…

But many of the officials I spoke to were skeptical of the Administration’s plans. Many of them fear that the proposed operation—called “preëmptive manhunting” by one Pentagon adviser—has the potential to turn into another Phoenix Program. Phoenix was the code name for a counter-insurgency program that the U.S. adopted during the Vietnam War, in which Special Forces teams were sent out to capture or assassinate Vietnamese believed to be working with or sympathetic to the Vietcong …

[A] former Special Forces official warned that the problem with head-hunting is that you have to be sure “you’re hunting the right heads.”

In the May 24, 2004, issue, Hersh published “The Gray Zone,” his third article on Abu Ghraib in as many weeks. This one looked at assassination as part of the backdrop of the prison scandal:

The Abu Ghraib story began, in a sense, just weeks after the September 11, 2001, attacks, with the American bombing of Afghanistan…. [Rumsfeld] authorized the establishment of a highly secret program that was given blanket advance approval to kill or capture and, if possible, interrogate “high value” targets in the Bush Administration’s war on terror. A special-access program, or SAP—subject to the Defense Department’s most stringent level of security—was set up, with an office in a secure area of the Pentagon …

“Rumsfeld’s goal was to get a capability in place to take on a high-value target—a standup group to hit quickly,” a former high-level intelligence official told me. “He got all the agencies together—the C.I.A. and the N.S.A.—to get pre-approval in place. Just say the code word and go.” The operation had across-the-board approval from Rumsfeld and from Condoleezza Rice, the national-security adviser. President Bush was informed of the existence of the program, the former intelligence official said.

Note the involvement of the C.I.A. in what the Administration might have “technically” called “combat operations.”

They carried out instant interrogations—using force if necessary—at secret C.I.A. detention centers scattered around the world.

A former intelligence official told Hersh, “The rules are ‘Grab whom you must. Do what you want.’ ”

Hersh also described the C.I.A.’s worries about where the program was going—and about the agency’s own involvement:

By fall, according to the former intelligence official, the senior leadership of the C.I.A. had had enough. “They said, ‘No way. We signed up for the core program in Afghanistan—pre-approved for operations against high-value terrorist targets—and now you want to use it for cabdrivers, brothers-in-law, and people pulled off the streets’ ”—the sort of prisoners who populate the Iraqi jails. “The C.I.A.’s legal people objected,” and the agency ended its SAP involvement in Abu Ghraib, the former official said. The C.I.A.’s complaints were echoed throughout the intelligence community.

Of course, the C.I.A.’s ending “its SAP involvement in Abu Ghraib” may not be the same thing as the C.I.A.’s ending its SAP involvement altogether. At the time the piece ran—five years ago—a source told Hersh that the SAP was still active.

The C.I.A. will continue to be downgraded, and the agency will increasingly serve, as one government consultant with close ties to the Pentagon put it, as “facilitators” of policy emanating from President Bush and Vice-President Dick Cheney. This process is well under way …

The President has signed a series of findings and executive orders authorizing secret commando groups and other Special Forces units to conduct covert operations against suspected terrorist targets in as many as ten nations in the Middle East and South Asia …

“The Pentagon doesn’t feel obligated to report any of this to Congress,” [a] former high-level intelligence official said. “They don’t even call it ‘covert ops’—it’s too close to the C.I.A. phrase. In their view, it’s ‘black reconnaissance.’ They’re not even going to tell the CINCs”—the regional American military commanders-in-chief.

Hersh wrote that one “Execute Order”

specifically authorized the military “to find and finish” terrorist targets, the consultant said. It included a target list that cited Al Qaeda network members, Al Qaeda senior leadership, and other high-value targets. The consultant said that the order had been cleared throughout the national-security bureaucracy in Washington.

And what about Congress?

Relevant members of the House and Senate intelligence committees have been briefed on the Defense Department’s expanded role in covert affairs, a Pentagon adviser assured me, but he did not know how extensive the briefings had been. “I’m conflicted about the idea of operating without congressional oversight,” the Pentagon adviser said. “But I’ve been told that there will be oversight down to the specific operation.” A second Pentagon adviser agreed, with a significant caveat. “There are reporting requirements,” he said. “But to execute the finding we don’t have to go back and say, ‘We’re going here and there.’ No nitty-gritty detail and no micromanagement.”

The “nitty-gritty detail” can be the most interesting part of that sort of operation. Hersh also mentioned concerns about the Administration’s reading of the law:

The legal questions about the Pentagon’s right to conduct covert operations without informing Congress have not been resolved. “It’s a very, very gray area,” said Jeffrey H. Smith, a West Point graduate who served as the C.I.A.’s general counsel in the mid-nineteen-nineties. “Congress believes it voted to include all such covert activities carried out by the armed forces. The military says, ‘No, the things we’re doing are not intelligence actions under the statute but necessary military steps authorized by the President, as Commander-in-Chief, to “prepare the battlefield.” ’ ” Referring to his days at the C.I.A., Smith added, “We were always careful not to use the armed forces in a covert action without a Presidential finding. The Bush Administration has taken a much more aggressive stance.”

Hersh noted:

The new rules will enable the Special Forces community to set up what it calls “action teams” in the target countries overseas which can be used to find and eliminate terrorist organizations. “Do you remember the right-wing execution squads in El Salvador?” the former high-level intelligence official asked me, referring to the military-led gangs that committed atrocities in the early nineteen-eighties.

“And we aren’t going to tell Congress about it,” the former official added.

Or, as another source told Hersh,

“It’s a finesse to give power to Rumsfeld—giving him the right to act swiftly, decisively, and lethally,” the first Pentagon adviser told me. “It’s a global free-fire zone.”

“Free-fire zone” is a term that harkens back to Vietnam, and to the way in which killing became indiscriminate there. The phrase comes up again in “The General’s Report,” a Profile of General Antonio Taguba (June 25, 2007). Hersh quotes a source who tells him that the early Findings issued by the White House after September 11th were “very calibrated,” but that,

later, they were expanded, turning several nations in North Africa, the Middle East, and Asia into free-fire zones with regard to high-value targets.

“FULL AUTHORITY TO WHACK”

Hersh writes in “The General’s Report” that the task-force operations authorized after September 11th “had authority from the President to kill certain high-value targets on sight,” that the “most secret task-force operations were categorized as Special Access Programs,” and that the “military task forces were under the control of the Joint Special Operations Command”:

A recently retired C.I.A. officer, who served more than fifteen years in the clandestine service, told me that the task-force teams “had full authority to whack—to go in and conduct ‘executive action,’ ” the phrase for political assassination. “It was surrealistic what these guys were doing,” the retired operative added. “They were running around the world without clearing their operations with the ambassador or the chief of station.”

Again, Hersh gets at the skirting of the line between military and intelligence operations:

By law, the President must make a formal finding authorizing a C.I.A. covert operation, and inform the senior leadership of the House and the Senate Intelligence Committees. However, the Bush Administration unilaterally determined after 9/11 that intelligence operations conducted by the military—including the Pentagon’s covert task forces—for the purposes of “preparing the battlefield” could be authorized by the President, as Commander-in-Chief, without telling Congress.

And he offers more reasons to doubt that these were purely military operations, as the Administration had “unilaterally determined”:

There was coördination between the C.I.A. and the task forces, but also tension. The C.I.A. officers, who were under pressure to produce better intelligence in the field, wanted explicit legal authority before aggressively interrogating high-value targets. A finding would give operatives some legal protection for questionable actions, but the White House was reluctant to put what it wanted in writing.

“IF YOU WANT ME TO KILL JOE SMITH, JUST TELL ME TO KILL JOE SMITH”

In the same piece, Hersh quotes “a recently retired high-level C.I.A. official, who served during this period and was involved in the drafting of findings.” The source

described to me the bitter disagreements between the White House and the agency over the issue. “The problem is what constituted approval,” the retired C.I.A. official said. “My people fought about this all the time. Why should we put our people on the firing line somewhere down the road? If you want me to kill Joe Smith, just tell me to kill Joe Smith. If I was the Vice-President or the President, I’d say, ‘This guy Smith is a bad guy and it’s in the interest of the United States for this guy to be killed.’ They don’t say that. Instead, George”—George Tenet, the director of the C.I.A. until mid-2004—“goes to the White House and is told, ‘You guys are professionals. You know how important it is. We know you’ll get the intelligence.’ George would come back and say to us, ‘Do what you gotta do.’ ”

Hersh noted that a spokesman for Tenet “depicted as ‘absurd’ the notion that the C.I.A. director told his agents to operate outside official guidelines.” Hersh continued:

The Pentagon consultant said in an interview late last year that “the C.I.A. never got the exact language it wanted.”

By the time “The General’s Report” was published, almost six years had gone by since September 11th, and a narrative had emerged in Hersh’s pieces—about the Bush Administration’s affinity for the assassination option, and its attempts to get around the law and Congress. It did so, in part, by deciding that certain things that looked like intelligence operations were really military ones. But was there a clean line between the Joint Special Operations Command and the C.I.A.? Again, Hersh’s reporting suggests that there was not.

There also—and this is important—does not seem to have been one single, discrete program but, instead, a series of executive orders, findings, and operations, across many theatres. Together, they could be said to have amounted to an assassination-friendly—or at least assassination-tolerant—culture within the Bush Administration.

A PHOENIX PROBLEM

But why not assassinate? Hersh’s sources invoke two episodes from our history, the Iran-Contra scandal and the Phoenix Program, which, very roughly and with much overlap, address that question from two different angles. One is legality—that, despite the Bush Administration’s attempts to be clever (too clever by half), they were still breaking the law. This might be called the Iran-Contra problem. (In “The Next Act,” November 27, 2006—a piece that also looked at Cheney’s influence—and in “The Redirection,” March 5, 2007, Hersh wrote that parallels to Iran-Contra were a source of anxiety for some Bush officials.)

Then, there is what might be called the Phoenix Program problem. The short way to put this is that assassination is stupid, messy, and wrong. This is true generically, and especially true in counter-insurgencies. You kill more people than you meant to, because you make a mistake or even, once you accept the notion of collateral damage, when you don’t. You create enemies. You end up being the enforcer in someone’s local feud. You turn young Americans into killers—all of those things happened with the Phoenix Program. Hersh writes, in the 2003 piece “Moving Targets,” that in the Phoenix Program, when deciding whom to kill,

the Americans relied on information supplied by South Vietnamese Army officers and village chiefs. The operation got out of control. According to official South Vietnamese statistics, Phoenix claimed nearly forty-one thousand victims between 1968 and 1972; the U.S. counted more than twenty thousand in the same time span. Some of those assassinated had nothing to do with the war against America but were targeted because of private grievances.

One can’t help thinking of Afghanistan, and its warlords and their rivalries.

And, of course, there is the matter of our values.

There seems to be something contagious about an interest in assassinations. One sees that as Hersh follows the story from Al Qaeda to Iraq to, eventually, Iran.

“CHENEY’S OFFICE SET UP PRIORITIES”

In “Preparing the Battlefield” (July 7, 2008), Hersh noted that the U.S. had been conducting clandestine operations in Iran for some time, and that Special Operations activities already included “the pursuit of ‘high-value targets’ in the President’s war on terror, who may be captured or killed.”

But the scale and the scope of the operations in Iran, which involve the Central Intelligence Agency and the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), have now been significantly expanded, according to the current and former officials. Many of these activities are not specified in the new Finding, and some congressional leaders have had serious questions about their nature …

A person familiar with the Finding told Hersh that it concerned, among other things, “potential defensive lethal action by U.S. operatives in Iran”:

The language was inserted into the Finding at the urging of the C.I.A., a former senior intelligence official said. The covert operations set forth in the Finding essentially run parallel to those of a secret military task force, now operating in Iran, that is under the control of JSOC …

The borders between operations are not always clear: in Iran, C.I.A. agents and regional assets have the language skills and the local knowledge to make contacts for the JSOC operatives, and have been working with them to direct personnel, matériel, and money into Iran from an obscure base in western Afghanistan. As a result, Congress has been given only a partial view of how the money it authorized may be used. One of JSOC’s task-force missions, the pursuit of “high-value targets,” was not directly addressed in the Finding.

As the person familiar with the Finding put it to Hersh,

“The Administration has been fuzzing the lines; there used to be a shade of gray”—between operations that had to be briefed to the senior congressional leadership and those which did not—“but now it’s a shade of mush.”

“The agency says we’re not going to get in the position of helping to kill people without a Finding,” the former senior intelligence official told me. He was referring to the legal threat confronting some agency operatives for their involvement in the rendition and alleged torture of suspects in the war on terror. “This drove the military people up the wall,” he said …

The Finding sent to Congress was a compromise, providing legal cover for the C.I.A. while referring to the use of lethal force in ambiguous terms.

The defensive-lethal language led some Democrats, according to congressional sources familiar with their views, to call in the director of the C.I.A., Air Force General Michael V. Hayden, for a special briefing. Hayden reassured the legislators that the language did nothing more than provide authority for Special Forces operatives on the ground in Iran to shoot their way out if they faced capture or harm.

The legislators were far from convinced.

Skepticism on the part of Congress would seem to have been wise.

One presence, as always, was Cheney’s:

“Everybody’s arguing about the high-value-target list,” the former senior intelligence official said. “The Special Ops guys are pissed off because Cheney’s office set up priorities for categories of targets, and now he’s getting impatient and applying pressure for results. But it takes a long time to get the right guys in place.”

And, Hersh wrote:

There is another complication: American Presidential politics.

Four months after that piece was published, Barack Obama was elected President, and George W. Bush became a lame duck.

Amy Davidson Sorkin, a New Yorker staff writer, is a regular contributor to Comment for the magazine and writes a Web column, in which she covers war, sports, and everything in between.

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